


The Neon God They Made

by holtcest



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Apocalypse, F/M, Ghouls(Fallout), Gore, Grief/Mourning, Incest, Mercy Killing, Mortality, Post-Nuclear War, Sibling Incest, fallout!au, radiation poisoning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-08-14 08:19:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16489037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holtcest/pseuds/holtcest
Summary: Katie remembers when the bombs fell.





	1. The little children raise their open, filthy palms

**Author's Note:**

> I love the Fallout universe and I couldn't stop myself from writing this.

Katie remembers when the bombs fell.

How could she not?

She was at home, with her father and mother, just having gotten home from school. The dull tones of a reporter on the local news station were as boring as ever; something or other about the high tensions between the warring nations of the world, the usual drone of the reporter filling the room. Katie usually did her best to ignore this, because the more she thought about it the worse her panic gets, but something made her listen today. She didn’t know what- or why- but there was this constant sinking feeling she got in her chest, even as she worked and ate up a bowl of Sugar Bombs ( _which, by all means, should have her bouncing off the walls_ ), playing with the locket about her throat.  

Instead it made her feel a bit ill, so she pushed the colorful bowl of puffed cereal to the side, trying her damnedest to focus on her work. The only sounds in the whole house was the scratching of her pencil and the shower, running hot for her mother to use after she had gotten home from work. Her father was likely in his office, reading or some other such thing, blissfully ignorant to Katie’s anxiety and the awful reality of the news reports. If she just kept thinking things were fine, they would be, right? Her mother always told her that the war would forever be at a stalemate, and she trusted her, but god. The cereal puffs started to sink in her bowl, her pencil tapping on the table to give her a different noise to listen to. 

The churning of her stomach kept nagging her that today, something was different. 

Today, something would snap. 

Katie had dozed for a good few moments, starting at nothing on the wall and resting her chin on her opened palm. Her brother should be almost home, the clock ticking in the background ever present. The birds outside were chirping, she could hear the neighborhood dogs barking and running through the fall leaves, her cat was munching on food in the kitchen–

“-confirmed reports of detonation in New York and… Pennsylvania. My god.”

Snapping to, Katie’s heart leapt to her throat. 

With her father in the other room and her mom taking a shower, she didn’t know if they had heard the reporter. She had to– had to get them, had to  _run_ – her brain scrambled in different directions, the screen on the television went to static, and she was out of her seat in moments. The cat scattered hearing her books crash to the floor, and she couldn’t quite care about the shattered bowl and mess she made. Distantly, she could hear the sirens from a few streets down begin to blare, her neighbors rushing out of their houses and cars ripping from driveways. This finally seemed to call the attention of her father, who rushed out of his office and banged on the bathroom door while Katie sprinted up to her room to grab a bag and stuff it with anything important.

Even the sound of her parent’s frantic voices hardly shook her; she felt as if she was outside looking in, packing sentimental clothes, books, snacks– the only other thought she has is wondering if her brother was close enough to home to seek shelter with them. When she runs back down the stairs, her mother has the emergency pack strapped to her back ( _packed for the occasion, just in case- rations, clothes, water, a radio_ ), is tossing gasmasks to her father and her, and Katie fumbled trying to strap it on.

What good would it do in the face of a nuke, though? All of the lessons about how to stay safe when the bombs dropped- it was all  _bullshit_ , and all you needed was common sense to see it. Hiding in the basement wasn’t going to do jack shit for them, and she knows it ( _distantly, she wonders if her father regrets not reserving them a spot in the local Vault_ ). Her mind was on auto-pilot as she was tugged out of the house, but Katie digs her feet into the pavement to shout:

“What about Matt, we have to wait for him–”

“ _Katie,_ there’s no time for that!”

Katie will never forget the way her mother’s face turned ashen, the normal hue of her skin fading until she looked like death ( _leaving one child behind was never in the plan_ ). The water still drips from her hair, soaking wet, even as she clips the mask on over her face and tugs her by the wrists until they’re moving around behind the house. Katie’s still begging them to wait for Matt when her father bolts the deadlock, corrals them against the furthest, deepest section of the basement. He stuffs heavy objects in front of the door before returning to them, hugging her mother and her close to his chest.

Distantly, she can still hear the sirens and the screaming above them, even though they’d been hunkered up in the basement for a few minutes. Her family didn’t think they’d need a vault or a safe room, and now they’d surely pay for it. But Matt’s still out there, and she struggles in her parent’s grip before sobbing out loud, more than assured that Matt is dead out there. ( _Surely they’d be safe here, in the basement, right?_ ) Just as they begin to settle into the damp basement, the loudest noise she’s ever heard shakes them all to their bones.

Katie only has time to take in one last breath ( _the filter of her masks tastes stale_ ) before a rush of  _heat_ rips up her back, coats the room thickly- 

* * *

 

The next thing she remembers is waking up in the dead of night, overwhelmed with nausea. 

It twists her stomach, makes her groan, and her parents seem to be in a similar state of agony. ‘ _Radiation poisoning, stage one_.’ her brain provides helpfully, and she chucks off her mask to run into the small bathroom in the basement, upending the contents of her stomach. If she didn’t know better ( _and she does_ ), she’d be liable to say that her organs felt like they were trying to escape out her mouth. Katie can hear how her mother throws off her own mask, retching into a bucket, and she tries to figure out how long they’ll last like this in the basement. 

They have enough supplies that, if they ration them well, might last them a handful of months, but beyond that…

The Holts spend weeks like this, eating modest meals, drinking minimal water, dealing with the nausea. It’s certainly not ideal, but what else can they do? Katie spends all the time she’s not using to eat, sleep, or cry ( _was there anything left? did **he** make it to shelter?_) to read the few books she managed to shove into her pack. Her parents keep to themselves, curled up around each other as her mother’s health rapidly deteriorates. If she stays against the wall, curled up on the mattress, she can pretend that she’s just in her room, reading by candlelight and not stuck in the basement, sucking up radiation like a sponge. If Katie just ignores the sound of her mother’s cries, of her father’s open weeping as he upends what little food he kept down, then she can make-believe that this is just some awful dream. She’ll wake up, safe and sound, Matt pressed against her back and her thick blanket around their shoulders; none of this will have ever happened.

Of course, this wasn’t the case.

Sleep was getting more and more difficult to come by, and it showed in the irritated way they all avoided talking to each other. Her books are more worn, pages dog-eared to hell and back, and as the days pass, she keeps looking over at the lean-to exit of the basement. Wondering if, maybe, there were other people seeking shelter ( _here she imagines Matt crawling through the fallout, half-dead_ ), who are swimming with more rads than she is. This nauseates her ( _or maybe she’d already felt that way– it was getting harder to tell_ ), and she bites back the bile that rises in her throat with a pitiful groan.

When her father’s skin starts to rot– well. 

That’s when she thinks about leaving for the first time.

* * *

 

Sam’s looking at himself in her mother’s little hand-mirror, taking in bloodshot eyes and the discoloration of his skin, and Katie’s head swims with a migraine. Colleen is rubbing his back weakly, bags under her eyes heavy and dark, the hair on her head thinning as the days pass. Katie has hardly spoken to them in a month, keeps to herself ( _the rot she’s already experiencing on her arms covered by a sweater_ ) and stuffs her face into a pillow. The air was thick, felt too hot and not hot enough at the same time, made her body jolt with both wakefulness and fatigue. She can hear her father’s voice rumble as he speaks to her mother, laments the loss of skin, and Katie softly brings up that they’re likely going to die of radiation poisoning if they don’t leave soon. Her voice is aching from disuse, but they turn their eyes to her ( _matching red and bloodshot_ ), furrowing their brows.

“But if we leave, we might become more exposed.” Sam rationalizes, walking over to her while her mom follows close behind. 

“So? We’ll die of starvation first. We hardly have any food left, and the stuff we do we keep throwing up.” Katie points out, bringing her face up out of the pillow ( _ignoring the way some of her skin sticks to the fabric_ ) and staring down her parents. 

Colleen bits her lip, looking between the two of them like she thinks they might fight. “Let’s wait a little longer, alright?”

So they do. 

* * *

A few days turn to weeks turn to months, and her parent’s conditions rapidly get worse. Before the next Sunday, both of her parent’s hair falls out, their skin bubbling and rotting off in places, hunger dissipating but leaving a strange sense of emptiness behind. Katie waits another day afterwords, her bag already packed up, when she sees how their eyes change. Sclera still red, but their irises look milky and white, as if they aren’t quite seeing anymore; Katie calls out to them, but their responses are voiceless, more of grunts than anything. The radiation must’ve crawled its way into them deeper, rotted their brains,  _killed_  them in every way that matters. Slowly, she rises to her feet ( _stumbles, so unused to walking_ ), approaches them and sifts through their bags for anything she could use– her mother’s mirror, some water canisters, her father’s pistol. 

Katie regrets never learning to shoot a gun.

It makes it harder to get a clean shot into their heads when she leaves.

* * *

Katie tells herself its a kindness, to put them out of their miseries, but she’s crying the whole way through. It takes three bullets before her father slumps over, and six before her mother follows suit. They look sad, lying there with blood pooling around them ( _off-color; the smell of their rotting flesh pronounced_ ), so she drags them over to the mattress, sits them up and wipes their faces down with the rags she finds in her mother’s bag. Katie tries to hold her breath, sniffs and coughs, tires to give her parents dignity in death where life had denied it to them. At least  _they_ were together, in the end.

The blanket is bundled up atop her backpack, and she straps back on the gas mask she came in with. Its a bit of a struggle to get the doors opened, but once she does and bursts through, she’s not sure that she thought it through. So much of the land looks…  _wrong_ , like someone wrung her vision through twenty filters and then upped the exposure. The sky is grey and green with clouds, and the surrounding neighborhood looks a wreck when she walks around to the front of her once whole home. Doors are blown clean off their hinges, windows are shattered, cars destroyed. Long-dead corpses line the sidewalks, picked clean of clothes and flesh, not much more than bone left to bleach in the sunlight. 


	2. Like tiny daggers up to heaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She walks for days and nights, weeks, seeing the occasional person who looks like her parents did.

Determined, Katie walks past old neighborhoods, broken homes, upended lives; still wondering. 

Did Matt ever make it to shelter? 

Did he  _survive_? 

Or is he one of these bodies, curled in on itself and stripped of life?

Katie can’t dwell on it, not now, not while she needs to look for water, food, shelter. Not that she’s felt particularly hungry lately, but force of habit drives her to move, to walk and walk and  _walk_  until her legs are sore and her knees are swollen. Few things are recognizable; she can spot the skeletons of buildings once filled with the bustle of humanity, empty parking lots filled with the husks of cars, fountains that have dried out. Like an old horror film, back when the thought of nuclear attack was only a rumor and not thought possible. Her stomach lurches despite being empty, as she pushes past piles of cars and half-eaten corpses, head low, eyes focused. 

When night falls, she ducks into an abandoned gas station ( _all boarded up windows and broken glass lamps_ ), until morning, checking over the place for anything else that might be lurking in its shadows before tucking herself into a corner, bundled up in a blanket. Sleep doesn’t come easy, never does these days, but she manages to stay low and quiet for a few hours. Katie doesn’t dream ( _or maybe she can’t, not anymore_ ), just tosses and turns and clutches at her stomach hours later, puking in the corner of the station. Katie spends some time chewing on old snack cakes she had managed to ration out this long, taking small bites and putting the last one away when she felt like her stomach would churn.

When she pushes the heavy metal door ( _once automatic, now just a double edged sword_ ) aside, the sun blazes brightly in the sky, still hazed over with greens and yellows that make the star look sick. More walking means seeing more of the destruction– bodies strewn out of their cars, their homes, clutching each other’s hands in what was likely horror.

* * *

 

She walks for days and nights, weeks, seeing the occasional person who looks like her parents did. 

Rotting. 

Shambling. 

_Putrid._

Katie just covers her mouth and moves on, seeing people like that. Mindless and lost to the world, nameless souls who would wander endlessly until death ( _if it would be so kind to seek them out_ ).

Eventually, she forgets how long she’s been walking; how long has it been since she ate?

Bathed?

Brushed her hair?

Although, when she goes to run her fingers through it, there’s not much left. A few long strands still cling to her scalp, but more or less it’s fallen out, lost to the streets she’s wandered and the places she’s slept. A quick glance in the mirror of a car _(she ignores the sun-bathed skeleton that sits, crashed, against the wheel)_ tells her that its more than just her hair that she’s lost. Katie almost vomits, looking at herself– some of her muscle was exposed, red and harsh in the yellow light, the flesh of her face hanging or stripped from bone and muscle. As if in disbelief, she raises her hands to her face _(one of her fingers is near bare)_ , poking at her nose, and watches as the cartilage gives under the light pressure. It doesn't hurt, but it makes Katie feel a distinct sense of  _wrongness_ , like her soul's been displaced and plopped back into the wrong body. No matter how many times she traces over the bone, the muscle _(the twinge of it under her fingertip the only thing telling her she's alive)_ , all that she can see is some twisted thing, not herself.

What even  _happened_  to her– when had the hunger dissipated to a dull ache? When did the fallout that still pours from the sky in the rain become  _invigorating_ instead of a  _burning_ ,  _scalding_ force?

This wasn’t the same thing that happened to her mom and dad. They had gone brainless, rotten inside, but had she managed to survive it? Katie spends weeks looking in reflective surfaces, avoiding mutated bugs and mammals alike, dodging the strangely altered buildings that are decorated with bags of viscera and bones. Sometimes, she hears the barks of dogs on her heels as she sprints through city streets, until she’s run so far out of the desert she once called home _(the crater where the Garrison once stood within sight, haunting)_ that its almost hard to recognize the landscape. 

“One of the bombs must’ve fallen here,” Katie muses to herself, voice thicker than before, scratching her throat. “For the clouds to be so thick and the craters to be so big.”

Without her permission, her thoughts drift to Matt again. All she can hope is that his passing didn’t cause him pain, that the radiation didn’t have a chance to seep into skin and blood and bone; perhaps he died swiftly, feeling nothing more than the fires that lick the ground at the drop of a nuke. But, even as she turns to look back at the sunken ruins of the Garrison, her heart aches. She’s spent so long trying not to  _think_  about it, about  _him_ , but how can she not? A locket hangs heavy on her neck, still, cold silver pressing to flesh that’s too soft and weighing on a heart that’s too fragile.

Maybe it would do her good to visit her brother’s presumed resting place. 

* * *

 

Katie makes way for the crater, feels the rush of radioactive air rush over her, hot and tacky and eye-opening. Stumbling down the harsh cliffs the bombs make was no easy task, especially not to someone like her, who’d never been particularly athletic or sport-oriented. But she manages all the same  _(like she’s been doing)_ , finding bits and pieces of the old Garrison strewn about the ground. A piece of a tower here, a partially collapsed wing there; vertibirds both broken and in bits. Idly, while kicking up the hard sand and avoiding the more dangerous looking debris, she wonders if Shiro or any of the other pilots made it home.

Although she thinks that she might hear a sound, its more likely her ears are playing tricks on her– after all, it didn’t sound of a radscorpion, or any such scuttling creature. More like the creak of a door, of rust and metal. Katie hunches down, runs her hands through the sand, mutters a half-remembered prayer under her breath. Only when she can hear the faint sound of footsteps does she turn, expecting perhaps a feral to be wandering close to her  _(some of them do as if they recognize her, seek out her by features and familiarity)_  but when she turns to call it over, she sees someone dressed in black, hazmat suit on, carrying a gun.


	3. And all the juvie halls, and the ritalin rats

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> His boots sound like the toll of a churchbell, echoing across the sand-covered, metal surface she rests on and up her knees into her bones.

Katie chokes on air when the man raises a weapon, some kind of rifle, the sound of her own heartbeat pounding in her ears. This is the first person she’s seen who hasn’t had their brain rotted, or mutated-- and he was looking to shoot her. Slowly, she puts her hands up, turns her body towards him as a show of her unwillingness to fight. All she came here to do was to mourn, to hold herself and cry for the loss of her family, and now she couldn’t even do that. The man in the hazmat suit slowly lowers his weapon, as if confused, and starts to approach her. His boots sound like the toll of a churchbell, echoing across the sand-covered, metal surface she rests on and up her knees into her bones. With a shaking breath, she rises up to her feet _(unsteady as the wind whips up the sand),_ waiting as he comes to a stop in front of her.

With all due caution, she tilts her head to try and see properly through the helmet _(only seeing her own sickly form reflected back to her)_ , biting her chapped lip and wringing her rotting hands in front of her. 

“I was just passing through,” Katie mumbles, the strain clear in her voice, in the rasp of it as her vocal chords ache in her throat. “Remembering the lost.”

He regards her _(maybe-- she can’t see through the glass)_ , nodding once before making a gesture with his arm. “Come on, then.” And while she’s not sure she should be following strangers around like this, she can’t help but feel that his voice is familiar, that it rings some kind of bell that she can’t place. When he begins walking a bit away from the Garrison site, she follows shortly behind, just a bit slower, a bit more cautious. Her limbs ache in the new, quickly-becoming-familiar-way, that makes her knees creak and her ankles swivel in their sockets with each step. If he can hear the noises her joints make, he doesn’t point it out, just occasionally looks over his shoulder at her. 

They’re walking for a while-- she tracks the sun as it moves across the sky through the murky clouds, tinged a sickly green-yellow that casts nauseating shadows on the sand. Like ghosts, they dance along the dunes and rocks, skirting against their feet as she’s led further and further from the Garrison site. When they arrive at a small metal structure, Katie waits for him to lead her inside.

Keys jingle at his waist as he unlocks the door, ushering her inside before taking locking up as Katie takes in deep breath. The air in here felt cleaner in her lungs, fresher somehow, as if that was even possible in this hell that they live in. This seems to be some kind of waiting room, with just a simple bench and locker next to another door; when she turns around, the man had taken off his helmet.

His hair is a lot longer than she last saw it, and she balks, taking two steps back and making a small noise, one finger outstretched in a point. “Are you--” she catches his gaze as he turns to her. “--Keith? Kogane?” 

With a confused furrow of his brow, he nods and looks her up and down again, as if trying to figure out where she knows him from. Then she watches as he catches glimpse of the locket that hangs heavy around her throat like a noose. A brief moment of understanding flashes in his eyes. “...You’re... Katie, aren’t you? Matt’s sister?”

With a frantic sort of nod that makes her neck crack, she stumbles over to him, feet unsteady despite the flat floors. “Did you see him? Is he _alive_? Did he--”

Keith puts up his hands, resting them on her shoulders as he leads her over to the interior door. “Let’s talk once we’re properly in the bunker, yeah?”

* * *

 

As if fearing the inevitable breakdown she would have, Keith spends a long time talking around the subject; about the day before the bombs, what he was working on, how it seemed so pointless in the face of the war. How, with each passing day, it felt harder to keep contributing to such a useless endeavor. Katie listens patiently, swinging her feet on the barstool, sipping at the water he gave her (it does nothing to soothe the scratch that permanently lingers in the back of her throat). When, finally, she’s sucked down the last of the water she’s looking down at her hands, tense.   
  
“...do you know what happened to him? Did he die?”  
  
If she was tense, Keith was strained; his eyes drop to the table, his legs cross and uncross before he’s decided on an answer. It feels like an eternity before he opens his mouth to speak.  
  
“I lost radio contact with the Garrison when the bombs fell. I’ve been scouting out the area to see if there’s a way in, but I’ve had... no luck.” Here he runs a hand through his hair, and Katie briefly envies the fullness of it. “If anybody’s surviving down there, I have no way of knowing or of getting inside.”  
  
 _Just a good as a death sentence, really, at the end of the day._ Katie doesn’t realize she’s crying until Keith’s standing up, slowly crossing the room _(she’s again reminded of bells when his boots hit the floor)_ to put a firm hand on her shoulder. With a strangled, breathless choke, she turns her body towards him, an aching arm flinging out to latch across his waist; he startles for only a moment before he bring up his other arm to trap her against his chest while she sobs.

How unfair of her to survive like this, half-hollow and broken, while he lays buried in the desert, a ghost that haunts her every waking moment. If he was still down there, has the radiation sunk into the walls enough for him to feel it? Does it burn him as it did their parents, turning his brain to mush and his heart to rot? Or is he fated to live as she does, wandering, _aimless_ , bones protesting every movement as if scorned? Either way, she’d never see him again, and the reality of the world finally, _finally_ begins to set in.  
  
Keith rests his palm on her scalp _(even that light pressure is enough to make the bone beneath warp)_ , holding her as tightly as he dares. “I’m sorry. We-- we both lost--” His voice is tight, like a bowstring pulled too taunt, and she looks up at him with her reddened eyes. “--lost someone. I’m sorry.”


End file.
